


If It Was Never New and It Never Gets Old

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Before TFA, Canonical Character Death, Flashbacks, Gen, Poe-centric, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-18 23:06:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5946739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Poe Dameron is a Commander of the Resistance starfleet and formerly of the New Republic Navy: he did not break when Hux’s men cut and probed and bruised and beat, did not break when Kylo Ren ripped open his mind, did not break when Iolo’s X-wing was lost in the carnage of a planet built to kill billions, he does not break as long as there is still a desperate need for justice and freedom in the galaxy.</i>
</p><p><i>He does not break when this tiny woman he barely knows says only a few words.</i><br/>----<br/>Or, the one where Force-sensitive Cadet Poe Dameron flies his first secret mission at sixteen. A lifetime later, it comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If It Was Never New and It Never Gets Old

** If It Was Never New and It Never Gets Old **

**001.**  
Poe Dameron is thirty-two years old and cutting through the sky on a shriek of T-70 wings, gunning missiles towards the Upsilon-class command shuttle polluting the air on Takodana with smoke and smog. He knows that ship. He knows who’s inside. There’s a pulse behind his eyes with remembering.

Poe bombs,  
and bombs,  
and bombs. 

But when he sees him, striding out of the thick forest with a girl in his arms, Poe does not take his shot. 

**002.**  
Poe Dameron is sixteen years old and knows that he’s left Yavin 4 for good: his home is with the New Republic Starfleet, and if that means, for now, sleeping in the too-small bed at the Academy dormitory and poring over flight manuals when everyone else takes cruisers home for hols, then that’s fine. He likes the Academy, and the New Republic likes him. He only lets his attention wander out of the classroom windows sometimes, across the horizon and toward the rolling hillside where the Jedi Institute live and train. He had been tested as a small niño, Master Snoke’s cold hands pressed to Poe’s forehead, but he wasn’t strong enough.

But Poe wonders, sometimes. He’s always looking toward that horizon.

 **003.**  
Poe is thirty-two years old and Maz Kanata’s castle on Takodana, Maz Kanata’s castle that stood for a thousand years, is rubble. Kylo Ren fled. So many stormtroopers were killed.

Poe killed another stormtrooper this week, too. One with a name. One who was human and good. Poe could feel it in his chest. FN-2187, Finn, Finn who had helped him escape, FN-2187 who’d only had a name for minutes before they crashed into the desert and Poe awoke alone—he was good.

[Master-Poe! Friend-Poe!]

“Beebee-Ate!” Poe has never been happier to see his little orange friend. 

Someone brought it back from Jakku. It came back.

 **004.**  
Poe is sixteen years old and he’s sitting in N-Dimensional Euclidean Calculus and he looks out the window, a tug from the sun on his cheek,  
and then he’s _dying_.

He must be. It’s the only name he knows for how he feels, a sudden crush like someone turned the grav on too high, too high for a human body to survive, all of his organs and juices flooding into his heart. Bile and acid and waste all press into his chest. His brain is going to pop out his eyes. He can’t see the classroom, Professor Ooinniean’s clear typeset on the holo. All Poe can see is red and black and darkness, and his mouth feels wrong, like when he still lived on Yavin 4 and would twist out his milkteeth before they were ready.

“Mr. Dameron?”

Poe staggers to his feet and gropes towards where he knows the exit is. “I have to go.”

He throws up, but he makes his back to the dormitory and his too-small bed. His blood boils in his veins.

 **005.**  
Finn is alive.

Finn is alive, and Poe can’t stop touching him just to make sure that it isn’t a dream. That it isn’t a Force trick. That he isn’t still strapped into that chair on the Finalizer. Finn seems to feel the same way, Finn whose hands were trained to have itchy trigger fingers and keep hold of electro batons, FN-2187 who chose to do the right thing.

“Poe,” says Finn. He’s wearing Poe’s jacket, and BB-8 whirrs around their ankles, knocking into their knees until they’re almost hip to hip. “I need your help.”

“Sure, buddy,” says Poe. “About time I got you back.”

“There’s a girl, Rey, I met her on Jakku—she helped me save Beebee and she flew the Millennium Falcon away from the TIEs, but Poe: the First Order has her. At Takodana, she disappeared, and Kylo Ren took her. We gotta go get her.” He pulls an honest-to-gods lightsaber from inside of Poe’s jacket. “I gotta give this to her.”

[Friend-Rey!] chirps BB-8 at Poe’s knees. It wiggles with determination. [Friend-Rey saved me from the bad Teedo. We will save her from the bad First Order!]

The girl in Kylo Ren’s arms as he boarded the Upsilon-class, all that desert pale against his black robes. Rey. Rey, a savior on Jakku. 

Something pulses behind Poe’s eyes.

 **006.**  
Poe is sixteen years old and shivering in his dormitory bed when the door opens. Headmaster Lor San Tekka stands shadowed in its frame and Poe thinks he looks ancient. He is, of course; he’s already lived longer than most human beings ever do. But he looks it, today, like the grav malfunctioned for him, too, and the world has laid too much weight atop his shoulders.

“Poe Dameron,” says Headmaster Lor San Tekka. “We need your help.”

“I don’t feel well,” says Poe. His heart is still trying to flush the gastric acid from his veins. There is still dark heat behind his eyes.

“I know,” says Lor San Tekka. He crosses the room in a soft hush of long robes and he lays a withered hand on Poe’s sweaty head. “Something terrible has happened. I suspect that what you feel is a disturbance in the Force.”

“I don’t have that.” Poe curls away from the heaviness of the hand at his brow.

“Of course you do.” The bed shifts less than Poe would have guessed as Lor San Tekka settles his old bones, sitting in the gap left by Poe’s curled knees. “The Force is in everything, the energy created by all that makes this galaxy and those beyond worth fighting for. I know that you are already a good fighter, Poe, just as your mother was. Poe Dameron, we all need you to fight for us now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There was… an accident at the Institute. They are gone. What you felt in Professor Ooinniean’s class, that was the fabric of the Force being ripped apart by cowardly hands.”

“Who’s gone?” Poe sits up slowly. It makes his breath heave like the centripedal sim. “Jedi Master Skywalker? Master Snoke?”

Lor San Tekka bows his head. “And all of the padawan. Except, I think, one. The medidroids and I marked off every name on the rolls as we gathered their bodies except one. A girl, Poe, the youngest Jedi I’ve seen. And very, very strong in the Force.” Lor San Tekka’s hands are tough and vital again as he grasps young Poe’s hands so tightly it shocks them into hurt. “If the galaxy has any chance against the Dark Side, we need you to find that girl. Before it does.”

 **007.**  
Poe is thirty-two and is not Poe Dameron right now, not until the job is done. For now, he is Black Leader, and if that is how he dies, then it is a good death. Finn who saved him, Finn who brought BB-8 and the map back from Jakku and met a magical girl-fighter wandering in the desert, Finn who can save the Resistance, is down there, below, right where Poe is shooting missiles and flying low through the tree-line. Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon are down there, too, and god, if Poe could ever admit to having fantasies about a Corellian freighter…

But Kylo Ren is also on Starkiller Base.

And so is Rey. 

Black Leader cannot care who else gets hurt down there on the snow-covered Starkiller: the weapon has to be destroyed, run after run over the thermal oscillator,  
and Black Leader bombs,  
and bombs,  
and bombs.

He can taste blood between his teeth and the Dark Side probes at the occipital flesh that holds his face together and somewhere down below them, because of Black Leader’s bombs, people are dying—people in white stormtrooper suits, people like FN-2187, people like Finn, maybe Finn himself, maybe Kylo Ren, maybe Rey—

“There’s a new hole in that oscillator. Looks like our friends got in there.”

Black Leader bites down on his tongue and swallows the blood and pulls the X-wing into a dive. “All right, let’s light it up!”

Afterwards, when the planet is calving and falling to pieces in a chain reaction, all of that white snow melting in sudden gulfs of magma, the Millennium Falcon screams into the sky behind Black One. Chewbacca, Han Solo’s wookiee, is at the wheel manning the ship alone, an unending anguish pouring from his throat over the comms.

But they’re onboard, Finn and the girl, the girl from Jakku, the girl who saved BB-8 on Jakku, Finn’s magical fighter girl from Jakku, Rey.

There is no pulse behind his eyes as Black Leader turns back into Poe Dameron, and Black One makes the jump to hyperspace.

 **008.**  
Poe Dameron is only sixteen.

He is not old enough for this.

The Jedi Institute is silent in a way that Poe could never have imagined, like the Knights of Ren stole the settling of the foundation and the dripping of the fountains and the squeak of the marble beneath Poe’s boots when they took everyone’s lives. The doors are noiseless on their hinges. The air is undisturbed by breath.

Poe had expected to be confronted with a battle scene, with blood spatter and gore, or mud and broken things, or the smell of char rotting into the stone itself. But the Institute is clean. Sterile. Because of course, the Force does not need to leave a mark. Shadows don’t stain the ground; they are there, and then they are gone. That is what the Dark Side does to people, too.

“Are you still here?” Poe tries, calling softly as though to a kitten. “It’s safe now, I promise.”

There is no answer.

He hadn’t really expected one. He has heard living silence before, during blackout drills, when the whole Academy have to go lights-out and off-link and try to become invisible. 

This is not that.

But he can feel that Lor San Tekka was right: there is someone here, a tiny spot of dimmed brightness, trying so hard to become invisible.

Poe closes his eyes and lets himself become quiet, too, lets his heartbeat slow like when he’s aiming a blaster, holds his breath until he’s a little dizzy and then exhales through lips barely parted, a sustained fullness until eventually, he is empty. 

When Poe inhales again, he thinks, _Snoke was wrong._

Poe keeps his eyes closed as he feels his way through the labyrinthine grounds of the Jedi Institute: it’s easier than to look and look and see only absence. But there is a tug at the bottom of his chest, the place he knows to aim with a blaster, like a second heartbeat. It’s faster. Smaller. Afraid.

Poe’s regulation boots are heavy, hard to be quiet as he crosses marble floors and climbs down a set of stone steps. _Should he sing to seem less frightening?_ The idea seems… vulgar. The silence here is for a reason. It is preserving the image of life these walls once held by denying it now.

The room at the bottom of the steps is different. There’s an electric crackle, fizzing beeps, a low and grinding mechanical wail. Nonsense Binary pleads with pain, begs to be decommissioned. 

The mirror-heartbeat in Poe’s chest is so fast he feels faint with fear.

He opens his eyes, and here is the gore, here is the wreckage: Skywalker’s droid workshop, smashed to pieces.

Someone did not want those soulful glass lenses to record what happened in this room.

 **009.**  
They land on D’Qar in a cluster of X-wings and celebratory bodies. The Falcon’s hatch opens, and Poe feels a heady tug under his solar plexus. A punch. He has no breath, his heart too fast, and it hurts. 

But it’s Chewbacca who comes down the gangplank, Finn in his arms. Finn’s lips are blue.

Poe runs alongside his stretcher and oxygen mask – this battle started when Finn had a mask – as the medidroids rush the good man towards the med bay. He waits just outside the Intensive Care Section until BB-8 nudges his knees, whirrs, needs reassurance.

 _It’s time._ Poe rests his hand on BB-8’s dome and likes the warmth of its casing at his side, home again, all the way back to the war room.

He can feel General Organa’s grief, the way she’s broadcasting hollow to every Force-sensitive being in the galaxy. It shrouds everything, even dulls the beat of Poe’s own heart between his ribs. Poe doesn’t know what to think: Han Solo went down into the belly of the Starkiller, a base Poe bombed in run after run, and never emerged. He’d rarely been on the Resistance base, but his presence in General Organa’s aura was huge—a size that Poe can only begin to appreciate now that it’s gone.

He knows how that feels; he felt his father being carved out like a calabaza when Shara was lost to them.

Poe can’t step any further through the doors.

And then Beebee rolls away, tuts at R2D2, the most determined little droid to make a friend, any friend, [Friend-Sir!]. And the old, battered veteran reboots. Awake.

[Master-Poe!] BB-8 insists, [I can help the resistance! I will save the day! Now, please!]

“Yeah, buddy, hold on,” says Poe, and he slots the drive into Beebee’s compartment.

BB-8 and R2D2 shine the blue holo map huge and beautiful and vital, and the room erupts in a joy so fierce that even General Organa is swept up in it, her relief a shade of gold that warms Poe to his toes. He did it, they did it: he was caught and tortured and found and saved and they lost so many good pilots, killed so many stormtroopers who may have been good people underneath, like Finn lost in the med bay—

But his mission is complete. They did it. The Resistance, and Poe. Finn, and Poe. BB-8, and Poe.

And Rey.

The whole war room is a jumble of arms and extenders and a few tentacles all tangled in tight hugs, and Poe wraps his arms around the closest bodies he can reach, one after another, and BB-8 first of all. Beebee’s triumphant wriggle-rolling bumps someone right into Poe’s chest and he just laughs, clinches on tight, his rough-shadowed cheek sliding along a warm neck into soft hair that smells of sweat  
and snow  
and _blood_  
and sand.

Poe steps back far enough that he can see her face, see her. And it is. It is her. Her hair in three knobs, still dressed like—

His arms are still draped around her waist, and she is so small. “Uh, hi. I’m Poe.”

Rey, the scavenger savior from Jakku, measures his face with her big eyes. She is an appraiser, used to gutting out the scrap until she finds meaningful cores, and Poe can feel her taking him apart with the same scrutiny. 

She nods. Just a little. “I recognize the name.”

 **010.**  
Coils of wire, silver guts, black glass and red paint. Dome-heads and R-series feet strewn everywhere. Little broken bundles of ports and drives and boards; Poe feels dirty, like he’s seeing the inside of a Cathar abattoir, filled wall-to-wall with tiny organs. And what a waste: the droids built by the Jedi padawans were so prized among the officers of the New Republic; no one understood what made a droid come to life like Luke Skywalker.

These droids are not destined to come to life. Poe gently moves a smashed C-series out of his way. It’s heavier in his hands than he expected, and the jagged metal edges are sharp. He hisses when the hole in the C-unit’s rectangular belly drags on his forearm and draws blood. _The first blood on the battlefield._ That’s supposed to be an honor.

Poe puts his bleeding forearm to his mouth and sucks at the salty blood to seal the wound as he closes his eyes again and tries to feel _out_. This is the room. But the girl that Lor San Tekka is looking for can’t be a droid—they might come to life under the Jedi engineers’ careful hands, but they aren’t really… 

_There_. Poe feels it, feels her, and it almost knocks him backwards just like the massacre did. But he doesn’t want to throw up. She’s… the opposite, is all Poe can think, she feels like hazy afternoons he can hardly remember, napping on Mamá’s lap under a soft blanket woven from the early-morning fleece of woolamanders, the smell of Abuelito’s cooking and the sound of winter rain on the air. That tiny tiny spot of Light makes Poe feel like he could live in that memory forever, and he will never, never, never fucking understand how anyone could choose the Dark.

Poe opens his eyes. There is no girl. His brow furrows, and he lets the tug in his chest pull him forward, boots crunching over shards of enamel, until he’s kneeling carefully in front of a round B-unit casing. It’s unfinished, most of the ports empty and no dome head attached. The gyro is undamaged, but sitting beside its intended home.

Poe’s heart hurts. He taps on the metal casing with one fingernail. “Hey in there.”

No answer.

“I’m Poe,” Poe tries. “Poe Dameron. I’m a student at the Academy, just like you’re a student here. I just wanna know if you’re okay.” Poe presses his ear to the cold metal and very, very faintly from inside, he can hear breathing, fast and tight. “Don’t be scared, okay? It’s just you and me. The—the scary guys are gone, okay?” He checks the floor for broken glass and settles down cross-legged. “It’s okay if you aren’t ready to come out. I won’t make you. I’ll wait as long as you need, okay? And when you’re ready, we’ll find you something to eat, buddy, how’s that sound?”

So he waits. He falls asleep, his head against the cold metal of the B-unit, and doesn’t wake until morning. He’s stiff from sleeping sitting up, but he keeps waiting. 

“You still in there?” He asks, and taps at the metal again. The ball rolls a fraction of an inch. “Okay, good. I’d feel pretty silly if I’d been talking to myself this whole time while you were up at the Academy eating pancakes without me.”

Nothing. 

So he waits. He watches the day pass overhead, the light in the room shifting its slant over the stone walls of the workshop through its high slit windows, the thin slice of morning in the north broadening until the whole room is bathed in sun and it reflects off all those broken bits of metal and glass right into Poe’s eyes. He squints, and keeps waiting. He talks sometimes, little questions, little stories. She is alone, the last padawan, but Poe wants to make sure that she knows she isn’t _alone_.

Finally, as evening angles the light into a red far corner of the room, the casing wriggles again. 

Poe sits up and faces it. Very slowly, the top half unlatches from the inside and starts to open, like an egg hatching. 

“Hi,” says Poe. She is so, so small. Her eyes are haunted and huge and she’s still wearing the soft beige wrappings of the padawan, soiled now with metal dust and the smell of urine and sweat. He can’t blame her. She’s only little. Her dark hair is held back from her face in three knobs tied with leather laces. She stares up at him, still curled in the bottom half of the B-unit body. But her tiny hands are tight in fists. 

“I’m Poe.” He tries a smile. “What’s your name?”

No answer. Poe keeps waiting, until she’s wriggling enough that he recognizes the galaxy-wide children’s symbol for “pick me up,” and he does. She is warm and _alive_ and she clings to him, her face in his neck and his nose against her hair, and her heart is beating and she is breathing and Master Snoke was wrong about Poe but Lor San Tekka was right about her: this girl is so, so strong.

Poe keeps murmuring to her quietly in Yavi, holding her face lightly pressed against his shoulder so she doesn’t have to see the emptiness that haunts the Institute, and he carries her all the way up the hill and back to the Academy. Her empty stomach rumbles against his ribs.

She only eats half a pancake before she throws up, and Poe reassures her that it’s okay, he did, too. She takes a break for a little while, but then comes back to finish her pancakes and syrup and Poe admires that kind of stubbornness. 

She falls asleep still clinging to his neck where he sits in a huge armchair in Headmaster Lor San Tekka’s office while the old man himself and Senator Leia Organa converse in low tones just outside the door. Poe might dream it when he hears a soft voice in his head whisper,  
_I’m Rey_. 

**011.**  
The next time Poe sees Rey, they are both silent because they have to be: the medidroids only let them into intensive care to see Finn, suspended in a bacta tank, on the condition that they make no noise and _do not dare disrupt Member Finn’s healing peace_.

Finn looks like he could use peace. They’d stripped him before entombing him in the bluish bacta solution, and Poe is almost surprised that Rey doesn’t seem fazed at all by his nudity, but it’s only a passing thought before he’s caught in trying to count all of Finn’s scars.

He can’t.

Besides the perfectly round wound in his shoulder and the massive, raw slice through his back, Finn’s skin is littered with evidence of life in the First Order. 

Poe had always thought those white suits of armor would protect them. 

And they must.

He wants to reach out and touch Finn’s survivor skin, to apologize, to pledge protection, to atone for getting him into this battle, but he can’t, and he can’t… he can’t touch Rey. She doesn’t need him to be comforted. So Poe wraps his arms around himself and just keeps staring. 

**012.**  
He’s given dispensation from courses and drills the next week under Headmaster Lor San Tekka’s solemn word that Cadet Dameron’s illness is really quite severe.

So Poe sits, perfectly healthy, and talks in a soft and constant stream of Basic and Yavi, back and forth, words and rhyming songs, to tiny Rey. At least one of her hands is always clenched in a fist. The only time she perks up at all is when Senator Leia Organa—of all people! Poe is starstruck—comes into the office to feed them. 

Rey still gets sick after a few bites of her food. She eats with her hands, and neither Poe nor Sen. Organa try to correct her. She isn’t hurting anyone. 

She isn’t hurting anyone.

The rest of the time, Rey hides against Poe’s chest, her grubby face smudged up against the crisp olive fabric of his uniform. It isn’t crisp long, with her wet eyes and nose and hot breath constantly on it. Poe’s throat gets dry and his voice rougher, cracking sometimes like he’s still one of the Junior Enlists, but he just sips the water that Leia Organa brings him and keeps talking.

“I think she’s asleep,” whispers Senator Organa. 

“I hope so,” says Poe, and he keeps on with his story about the time he smuggled a runyip home back on Yavin 4 and hid the creature under his bed until it ate right through the wooden floor. He keeps rubbing circles on Rey’s small back as she breathes, _alive, alive, alive_. 

He takes the sweet lozenge that Leia offers him and returns her sad smile.

 **013.**  
Later, Poe sits at the desk in his cramped quarters with a glass of water and a headache fizz at his elbow as he rubs his temples: how can he write to Iolo’s family and tell them that he died because Poe brought him to the Resistance, away from a sanctioned position with a pension and a newer ship and a bigger fleet, that he died because Poe couldn’t run fast enough on Jakku to prevent a full-out war?

Some spy. Some _commander_.

Some friend.

He’s already written five messages tonight, but he’ll wait until the morning to record holos. He feels too raw inside to put on his dress uniform, even to comb his hair, and these families… they deserve better. He did send a quick holo to Pops back on Yavin 4 on the way back from the med-bay: just crouched there in the corridor to talk into BB-8’s camera and send it along quick. _I survived. Stay safe._

Pops can see how tired he is, and that will be alright. He’s been here. Even years after Endor, Poe would sometimes wake in the night because he could hear the soft clinking of ceramic mugs in the kitchen and knew that his brave, brave parents had nightmares of their own. They never minded when he tugged at their blankets and asked to sleep warm in between them for protection.

Poe rubs his aching temples, stress tight in his muscles, and wishes that he’d ever developed their taste for caf.

[Friend-Poe! Master-Poe! Friend-Poe! Master-Poe!] BB-8’s chittering chant makes it through the door before it does, barreling through it belly-first like always. [I need your help, please!]

“What d’you need, buddy?” Poe sets down his stylus. He’d been looking for an excuse.

[Friend-Rey is…] The small droid wobbles on its gyro, calculating and sifting through dictionaries for a word. [In great distress. I am afraid she has short-circuited, Friend-Poe.]

Poe touches Beebee’s casing lightly. “I’m sure she’s okay, bud. People can’t really short-circuit.”

Beebee’s great curved lens just stares at him, unblinking and at a solid dilation, taking him in, silent except for the slight whirr of the gyro motors, until Poe sighs. “Yeah, alright, I’m coming with you. Just lead the way.”

They don’t head for the mess, like Poe would have thought, or even the med-bay. BB-8 leads him outside, past the landing strip where the Falcon still sits, its lights dark and its soul empty, past the hangar. They cross a ridge of terra shrubs and muddy roots and Poe wishes that he’d put on real shoes. Beebee keeps chirping to itself as it passes landmarks that Poe can’t quite decipher until finally they hit the rust-colored sandbar of the lake’s shore.

Poe can barely see her in the dark. She is almost invisible, just a pale spot against the sand a different color from Jakku and too far up the beach for the night’s tide to bring its iron-dark water up to touch her. He doesn’t know whether she came here for the reminder of the sand or the newness of the water or the promise of the sky. 

BB-8 rolls right up to her, booping in low, soothing tones, and bumps gently up against her curled arms. [Friend-Rey! I retrieved Master-Poe! He is very good at fixing things!]

“Go away,” Rey sobs into her arms. “I’ll hurt you, too.”

“What?” Poe asks, stepping onto the sand. He stays feet back from her as BB-8 lets out a surprised whoop and its _threat alert_ siren before Poe holds out a hand to shush it. “Who’d you hurt, Rey?”

She tucks her knees up tighter into her chest and she… she looks small enough to fit inside of a BB-casing, if she had to. He knows that’s silly. She’s a grown woman. 

One of the knobs of her dark hair is loose, a lock trailing down to her waist. Poe wonders if she’s ever cut it, or whether the frayed-soft hair at the ends was there the last time they saw each other a lifetime ago. Rey carries so much around in her body as it is.

“Finn got hurt because he came back for me,” Rey mutters. “He’s the only person ever to come back for me. And it’s killed him.”

“It didn’t kill him,” Poe promises, his insides bloody. He kneels beside her on the damp sand, grit getting into his scrapes and cuts. He holds a hand above the curl of her spine, close enough that he can feel the heat of her against the cool night air, but he doesn’t touch. “Rey, he’s going to be alright. Bacta’s amazing. He’ll be… good as new soon. You’ll see.”

“Han,” she whispers in response. “I left Jakku and it’s killed him. If I’d just stayed… where I was supposed to. He wouldn’t have been there. Kylo…”

“You are not responsible for anything that Kylo Ren does,” Poe says. And he _does_ touch, now. He feels ancient as he rests an open hand at the top of her back, and she breathes, _alive, alive, alive_. She is alive, when so many good people are not. She is alive, when Han Solo is not, and Iolo Arana is not, and Finn is barely hanging by a thread despite the glowing blue bacta. But she is alive, her skin warm against Poe’s hand through the sand-worn linen, and she is breathing and still smells of sweat and blood and the silence of snow.

“I think I am,” Rey whispers. She lifts her head and the reflection of starlight glints off her big eyes. “I can’t remember why. But when I was in his head…”

Poe brushes his thumb over the nobble of bone at the base of her neck and watches the gooseflesh raise on the spare uncovered bits of her upper arms. “No. There’s always a choice.”

But that just makes new tears shine in her red-swollen eyes. “Finn is the first person ever to choose me. And look what’s happened.”

Poe shifts to sit beside her, the sand cold and grimy beneath his pajama bottoms, but the warmth of her radiant as his arm and hip match hers bone-for-bone: she’s thin, too thin, but tall, and Poe has never pretended to be a big man. He doesn’t put his arm around her, but he does keep one palm working gently over the tight muscles of her neck. 

“I chose you,” Poe offers, quiet. “Against General’s orders. She said we had to retreat from Starkiller immediately before the nova, but… I couldn’t leave if you were down there. Did a recon. I wouldn’t leave until I saw the Falcon with you in it in the air, too, even with the grav of the implosion.”

“If you hadn’t seen the Falcon,” Rey tries, looking carefully out across the water, “Would you have come back for me?”

Poe Dameron is a Commander of the Resistance starfleet and formerly of the New Republic Navy: he did not break when Hux’s men cut and probed and bruised and beat, did not break when Kylo Ren ripped open his mind, did not break when Iolo’s X-wing was lost in the carnage of a planet built to kill billions, he does not break as long as there is still a desperate need for justice and freedom in the galaxy. 

He does not break when this tiny woman he barely knows says only a few words.

But Poe Dameron also knows when he has made a terrible mistake. So his throat is full when he says, “Yes. Rey. I would have come back for you.”

 **014.**  
Someone is lifting tiny Rey out of Poe’s arms, and he wakes with a start and a grasp, ready to fight, ready to call on whatever corner of the Force that will listen to him if he has to, _they aren’t getting her, too, they got all the others, but they can’t have her--_

“Stand down, Cadet Dameron,” says Lor San Tekka, touching Poe behind one ear like he’s a skittish hunthound. 

Poe rubs his eyes with one hand but doesn’t let the other leave its loose hold around one of Rey’s little ankles, the first thing he could find when he reached out. Once his vision clears, it’s only Senator Organa holding the sleeping child. The thin skin below her eyes glistens in the soft nighttime light as she smooths a hand over Rey’s forehead.

“What are you doing to her?” Poe asks. He sniffs hard once to clear his nose and throat and then gestures back to his chest. His neck is so stiff from spending days almost entirely seated in the same chair. His whole body aches. “I’ve got her. I’m fine.”

“She can’t stay here,” says Lor San Tekka. He keeps a gentle, restraining hand on Poe. “It is not safe. For her or for anyone else.”

Poe watches Leia cradle the tiny form in her arms and feels the apology of her, the guilt and the weight, ooze into the air around them as she murmurs and touches Rey’s forehead and all at once, on a deep inhale, Poe understands what Leia is doing. Rey’s face creases in her sleep, little lips drawing into a frown as she fusses: Poe wants to snatch her away, push Leia’s hand from her head, stop her from sealing away Rey’s memory, her power, her thoughts. 

“That isn’t fair,” Poe whispers. 

“No,” agrees Lor San Tekka: “It is not. But the Dark Side does not fight fair, Cadet Dameron. So neither can we.”

“I’m not talking about a fight.” Poe reaches out again and touches Rey’s palm with one finger, and she clenches onto it tight even in her sleep. “I’m talking about… it’s not fair to _her_. She should get to choose whether she wants… she can still be a Jedi, can’t she? Without the Academy? You could teach her,” he says to Leia. “Or…”

“I’m no Jedi,” says Senator Organa. “She’s got too much power for me to handle without Luke. She isn’t safe here without a teacher, Poe. None of us are.”

Poe looks from Leia Organa’s face, still beautiful but weatherbeaten with politic and heartbreak, to Lor San Tekka’s academic lines and far-seeing eyes, to Rey’s sleeping brow, unfurrowed now without any memory of her trauma to cause her pain. He feels as though his chest has been cleaved in two with a lightsaber, everything in him falling through the opening onto the floor to be sorted through and measured and weighed on the steps of the Jedi temple or the Senate floor or the delicate wings of a starfighter. They’ll come up wanting, whoever is scavenging through Poe. 

He wishes he had never closed his eyes and let it in, whatever it was that he breathed in the Academy’s stone walls. Because it is _less_ now. It is less because Rey is right there, but she isn’t a point of bright light anymore. She’s dimmed. Like anyone else.

Senator Leia Organa bends to kiss Rey’s sleeping forehead. _They look alike_ , thinks Poe, and Leia looks up and at him and through him and maybe, maybe he will file that thought away for another time, this thought of where, exactly, a tiny Jedi survivor came from and why it’s Leia Organa herself who gets to decide what to do with her when there’s a whole galaxy of other concerns vying for her attention.

Lor San Tekka touches Poe’s shoulder again; it is heavy and serious and his hands are old, veined, weighed down by a large Old Republic signet ring with a gem cracked through and metal burnished.

“Cadet Dameron,” says Lor San Tekka, “The galaxy needs you to fly a secret mission for the Light. For all of us. But I will not make you, if you are not ready.”

Poe Dameron is only sixteen years old, but he swallows and straightens up into full attention before holding out his arms. “My duty is to the good of the Republic. I’m ready, sir.”

But he isn’t, really. He isn’t ready to hear two adults he trusts with his life tell him to leave a little girl at a smugglers’ market on a desert hellhole, he isn’t ready to promise never to tell his father, a war-hero they know themselves, who would never, ever abandon a child. He isn’t ready to question an order.

So he doesn’t. Question it, that is.

They set him up in a ship that doesn’t require a copilot or an astromech, and it’s just as well, since the New Republic Navy will be short on droids for a long, long while. It’s a quadjumper, unmarked and dented, and Poe doesn’t need to be told to avoid scanners if he can because the QJs are such a magnet for piracy nets. He puts on Pops’ old Rebellion flight suit and helmet for the ride because it feels right, to follow in his parents’ footsteps while in service to the Jedi order, while flying a secret mission for the good of the universe. It’s easier to convince himself that Mamá might have agreed with this if he wears their colors.

Lor San Tekka strokes Rey’s round baby-cheek after Poe buckles her into the second seat. “I only need to file paperwork with the Senate to retire,” he says. “And I will follow to a nearby village. She won’t really be alone.”

Poe nods. A nearby village is not the same as a home, a family, an embrace of fellow padawans and a master who cares. “I’ll give you a report when I get back. If you’re still here.”

Leia Skywalker Organa steps up and onto tiptoe to kiss Poe’s cheek before he slides on his father’s old helmet. “May the Force be with you. Both of you.”

Poe swallows back, _I thought the whole point of this was to keep that from happening_.

 **015.**  
Poe Dameron is thirty-two years old and should know better.

Apparently he doesn’t.

He tries to hate himself either a little more or a little less for it when he falls asleep still wrapped around the bare-shivering Jedi in his too-small bed, but he can’t: _the Force has been awakened_ , says someone who sounds awfully like poor, dead Lor San Tekka in his head, and Rey glows with it, a point of bright that warms him from the inside out and makes him feel like she’s stripped his bones of their marrow and filled them new with something stronger, something better. She is entirely made of strong stuff, built of muscle and sand and naught much else but defiance. Feeling that spark of Light again feeds something in Poe that’s been missing—

Well. For a long time.

Rey sleeps with her muscles coiled and ready to spring awake at a moment’s notice. Ready to fight or flee. There’s a careful scar on her hip in alien cuneiform that Poe can’t read. Her eyes never stop moving beneath closed lids, the veins soft and pale and beautiful and alive, alive, alive, and Poe can’t help touching lightly. She doesn’t make any noise when she turns her face away and continues to dream.

Poe wonders how much she remembers.

Poe dreams of dry grit and wind so fragile it breaks like plaster against the wings of spacecraft, of broken metal coils and stripped wires and tiny sticky hands and wet noses. He dreams of biscuits shaped like ewoks and of silence. 

He dreams of Dark hands ripping into his mind and pulling memories apart without care, leaving bits and pieces where they don’t belong so BB-8 becomes Rey and Rey becomes Lor San Tekka and Lor San Tekka becomes Mamá, but Jakku is always, always Jakku. He dreams of a black mask lifting and Unkar Plutt’s bulbous, cruel face beneath. He dreams that a slaughtered village is a stone schoolhouse ringing with the silence of massacred padawans.

He dreams of the way he almost crashed the quadjumper on the way back home trying to fly through tears, of the way the ejector seat on that TIE fighter bled bruises into his skin and his ribs that still ache whenever he breathes.

Poe Dameron is a grown man, but he wakes in a cold sweat—and Rey’s hard-callused, curious hand at his temple. 

Neither of them speaks.

 **016.**  
Rey wakes when Poe has to jerk the quadjumper in a none-too-graceful emergency maneuver around an asteroid: she’s fussy and her nose is wet and Poe can’t pilot through an asteroid field _and_ shush her kindly at the same time, not all by himself. Eventually the route clears of debris enough that he can reach into his flight pack and unearth a little parcel of biscuits shaped like ewoks.

He keeps waiting for her little voice to float into his head again, but it doesn’t. Maybe it can’t anymore because of what Leia Organa did to her mind. Maybe she’ll never miss it. He chances a glance away from the controls and over to his small, precious passenger, but she’s merely gazing at him. Crumbs all down her front.

“We’re not very far,” Poe assures her.

“It won’t be scary,” Poe promises.

“It’s only for a little while,” Poe lies,  
and lies,  
and lies.

Yavin 4 is a dense jungle planet, hot and wet with temperatures that can be hard to bear in the summertime and a sun that can be blinding. But Poe has never felt anything like the dry, brittle heat off the dunes when he lands the quadjumper on Jakku, near the Goazon Badlands, hidden by the skeletons of rusting, eroded wrecks. The glottal wails of an inhuman fight echo in the wind from the cobbled-together trading post at the bottom of a sandy cliff. There’s a thick, wet thunk, then a cheer, and then nothing except the mournful sound of the sand cascading over and over itself to make dunes higher than mountains.

This is no place for a little girl.

Small fingers worm their way into Poe’s hand. Rey looks up at him, that strangely placid look still keeping her face smooth, like without the Force, she doesn’t know what to think. Poe squeezes her hand. It’s sticky. She’s still wearing her padawan wrappings.

They walk up the dunes toward the meeting-place that Lor San Tekka arranged for the _handoff of the asset_ , and it’s slow-going with Rey’s short legs and the way the sand shifts underfoot. She spills onto her knees once, mouth round with surprise as the fall yanks Poe’s arm with her, but she doesn’t cry when he helps her up again. 

Poe doesn’t cry, either. There’s just grit in his eye. This whole world, it’s just a big ball of grit, and it’s no place for a little girl.

Lor San Tekka’s contact is a grumpy Crolute entirely too far from any ocean to fit in: his skin sags on every limb and his sunken eyes are cold and hard and judgmental when he sees the charge that Poe delivers. Rey’s hand tightens in Poe’s when she sees him, too.

“This is the girl?” 

“Yes,” says Poe Dameron, trying to sound older than sixteen. “And you’re Unkar Plutt?”

“Who else would I be?” He sounds impatient. Sounds like he’s always impatient. “Give her to me.”

There’s a brand in his hand, glowing hot even against the Jakku desert.

Rey looks up at Poe, all big eyes and silence, and Poe kneels down to her level. 

“It isn’t forever,” he says, and tries to believe it. “You just have to stay here until it’s safe, okay? Just stay right here and wait for—for someone to come get you. You’ll be alright.” He smiles braver than he feels, and then—it feels right: he places Kes Dameron’s old Rebel helmet on Rey’s tiny head. It wobbles, too big, when she tilts her head and peers at him through the yellow visor. “You’re safer here than you’d be with me. So just wait, okay? Right here. And someday, we’ll come back for you.”

He hugs her, little and precious and entirely too alive, wonderfully and miraculously and dangerously alive, and there is nothing else that Poe can do. He is only sixteen years old, only a cadet, only a human being.

He stands and nods to Unkar Plutt. He can’t look down at Rey again, he can’t. So he just turns on his heel and starts the slow, treacherous trek back down the dune toward the quadjumper.

“No!” 

It is a high, small voice, but its pain rips across the widening gap in the desert. It’s familiar, and Poe wishes it weren’t.

He’s never really heard it before, after all. Not aloud.

“Don’t go! Come back! No! Come back!”

Poe Dameron is sixteen years old, and he ignores the burn of his muscles as they slip on the soft grip of the sands of Jakku that sink and steal and keep everything for themselves as  
he runs,  
and runs,  
and runs.

 **017.**  
Poe doesn’t know what to say to Rey the next morning, but it turns out to matter less than he’d feared before rolling over. His bed is empty. BB-8 knocks insistently against the mattress, chirruping for Poe to [Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! There are many tasks to accomplish today!]

Poe pats Beebee’s head and drags himself out of bed. His bruises ache when he washes, presses his fingers over the purpling marks under the lukewarm spray of the fresher. His thoughts feel raw and loose in his head, like if he turns his head too hard, whole memories might fall out onto the floor for everyone to see.

They can. He’d deserve it. 

He combs his hair and painstakingly shines his boots even though they won’t show in the holo to Iolo’s family and all of the others. Poe Dameron is a Commander of the Resistance, and does things the right way. He records the holos with his stomach empty—makes it easier—and then chivvies BB-8 out the door and back to the med-bay.

Rey is there, sitting at Finn’s bedside, wearing clothes that Poe recognizes as having once been General Organa’s, back when she was a Senator, smaller like Rey but just as fierce as now. Old, battered R2D2 stands silent guard beside her, but BB-8 gives an excited whirr and both droids wriggle and chatter at each other before wheeling off to cause mischief.

Poe sits down at the other side of Finn’s still body. Rey holds one of Finn’s hands with both of hers, so Poe takes the other. Finn’s hands are softer than he would have thought a stormtrooper’s would be. Softer than Rey’s, for sure. Softer than his own. Poe is just glad the skin is warm. He can feel Finn’s pulse with his thumb, and it matches up to the comforting lub-dub of the monitors. Reassurance.

Rey does not cry in the daytime. She holds Finn’s hand, adjusts his blankets, touches his cheek. She lights up the room from inside, the Force so strong in her that Poe doesn’t even need to wonder whether he’s sensitive to it to see it in her: it was never something that anyone, not even General Organa, could have hidden away for too long. Even the deserts of Jakku could not burn the Light from her. It’s just _there_ , the way the walls are, the way air buoys X-wings and D’Qar is full of green. It’s a fact of her being. And it’s beautiful.

It makes Poe feel very young.

“I’ll watch over him,” he promises. It isn’t a lie. “While you’re gone.”

Rey nods, her eyes wise and far-off and primeval as she looks into Poe. They don’t touch during the daytime, either. “I know. But I’ll come back.”

**Author's Note:**

> (Entering a new fandom is Really Scary, but pls come talk to me about Star Wars @ [aimmyarrowshigh](http://aimmyarrowshigh.tumblr.com) on Tumblr!)


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